well I should've posted this right when the hurricane hit. But:
even if its a small amount, donate. I would say, it could be you one day,
but in light of the law of one it is us this day, each of us - and in some way
we can extend dimensions of help - in prayer, sympathy and the good ole green:

minimum donation is 5 dollars and I think that everyone of us can manage that much at least, and much more
in thought and prayer. TO those that may have family and friends there as well, my thoughts and prayers are
with them and all others.

I just heard about the "relief" money going down to Houston... they are using it to buy drugs, liquor and hookers, according to police reports. Crime has almost tripled since the arrival of the "refugees".

I'm not contributing anything. It was their free will choice to stay; they had ample warning and opportunity to leave. They made the choice to live 10 feet BELOW sea level, not I. And now, with all this "relief", they won't even have to live with the consequences of their choices. That's not the reason we are here in the 3rd density.

WarmSylph wrote:well you raise a good point lonebear. however, for some the desire is for releif-aid - to deny them that is to dis-service them. Are you so sure you can decide for all of them what they need?

First, we are dealing with the United States, so all Constitutional restrictions apply. The Constitution does not grant government the power to provide aid to anyone. Read the Federalist Papers; there was a big debate on it 200 years ago, which proved this point. The conclusions were that government would use the power to buy people, cities, counties and even states, and thus become the master of the people, instead of its servant. Look at what we have now. Bush's actions providing relief are totally unconstitutional, and he should be impeached for violating his oath of office.

Secondly, you may want to consider the basic psychology of projection. A desire to "help" is not a desire to "serve." I read an interesting article the other day on the psychology of the relief effort, and it had an interesting conclusion that "donors" were donating pity, not love, it an attempt to provide relief for their own guilt complexes. Is that charity?

Lastly, I didn't write the laws for the first three densities. I only point them out. If one wishes to evolve, then they must follow the laws governing the system. We grow by facing our challenges. There are a few in New Orleans who are; they know what they did and are working to recover on their own. But the majority--who are the recepients of "relief"--do not. They don't even care... except to cry on television to make sure the free money keeps flowing. If you've ever traveled to a 3rd world country, you'll know about this "con." I knew homeless people in Albuquerque who looked and acted like the most destitute people on the planet -- making $120,000 a year on handouts.

I do not judge; if you have individuality, then you are free to choose whether you contribute or not. The rest will be governed by group mind to contribute, because it is politically correct. To be of service is to assist people in their evolution. It is that simple. Helping to keep them looping in a system of distraction is a total dis-service.

Of course there is pity there, its an awful situation to go through especially without any understanding of how to evolve from something as catalytic as Mo' Nature herself. As a group they are lost and in 'animal' mode, but not all of them. I felt moved to send my money because most people are suffering without learning from it, and perhaps a way they can get some perspective is to move beyond the experience and digest it. Not all of the of course, my 50 dollars isn't buying them insight and truth, but if it allows one person to feel taken care of by others, a bond with others who care, that MIGHT open one's person to open to others and that is evolutionary. Of course its speculation, and like the terrified portions of my mind, I want to comfort them and help them through this, true the most helpful would be to share confidence in their ability to be strong and resilient. But unfortuantely i cannot communicate.

feeling and thought are both truth, i felt some hefty sadness for most of those people and especially the children who are obviously more resilient than the 'adults' in this event. I feel that this could've been a huge opportunity for unity, and of as usual, that has not been the outcome on a large scale. But perhaps in small ways it has been.

LoneBear wrote:
I do not judge; if you have individuality, then you are free to choose whether you contribute or not. The rest will be governed by group mind to contribute, because it is politically correct. To be of service is to assist people in their evolution. It is that simple. Helping to keep them looping in a system of distraction is a total dis-service.

Doesn't Ra talk in the LoO about first feeding the starving then assisting them in their evolution. (I think I remember reading this). Of course it depends on your motivation for giving (relieving guilt, political correctness, being considered a good guy) but there is the whole tradition of titheing - giving away a 10th of your income. Not all those who stayed in New Orleans chose to do so. They didnt have the means to leave. Maybe their staying assists the wealthier in their spiritual evolution in regards to giving/ compassion etc.

LoneBear wrote:Lastly, I didn't write the laws for the first three densities. I only point them out. If one wishes to evolve, then they must follow the laws governing the system. We grow by facing our challenges. There are a few in New Orleans who are; they know what they did and are working to recover on their own. But the majority--who are the recepients of "relief"--do not. They don't even care... except to cry on television to make sure the free money keeps flowing. If you've ever traveled to a 3rd world country, you'll know about this "con." I knew homeless people in Albuquerque who looked and acted like the most destitute people on the planet -- making $120,000 a year on handouts

Love, compassion - service to others = action, not necessarily with money. Providing food and clothing could be immediate needs considering what happened in New Orleans.

LoneBear wrote:Secondly, you may want to consider the basic psychology of projection. A desire to "help" is not a desire to "serve." I read an interesting article the other day on the psychology of the relief effort, and it had an interesting conclusion that "donors" were donating pity, not love, it an attempt to provide relief for their own guilt complexes. Is that charity?

Understand where you're coming from.
We think about serving others. But, how do we know if those affected by the hurricane disaster aren't serving us/others. For example, bringing compassion to those that would be reluctant to serve/help before. Situations like this move people (some) that would otherwise not be moved in different circumstances. Which reminds me....this whole thing about STO and STS. As long as there is interaction with others, we serve one way or another. Whether negative or positive, whether we see it or not. We are a reflection/projection of one another. I know this is what some of you have been trying to say.

WarmSylph wrote:especially the children who are obviously more resilient than the 'adults' in this event. I feel that this could've been a huge opportunity for unity, and of as usual, that has not been the outcome on a large scale. But perhaps in small ways it has been.

This is what I'm hoping the outcome will bring, "Unity". In someways it has - bringing love and appreciation between families and others. In turn - positive results for some. Any bit serves all.

lvx08 wrote:Doesn't Ra talk in the LoO about first feeding the starving then assisting them in their evolution. (I think I remember reading this).

Ra's story is a metaphor. "Give a man a fish, and he has food for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he has food for a lifetime." Our whole society is based on giving out fish, and covering up the knowledge of fishing.

WarmSylph wrote:my 50 dollars isn't buying them insight and truth

According to David Wilcock, the $8.75 that actually got to someone, barely bought one meal. The rest was absconded by administrative fees and the Department of Homeland Security, just as it was with the 911 relief effort. Suffering is big business!

i hear what you are saying LB. But I went fishing in my own pocket to give what I have more of without any expectation. Just giving. My intention was to contribute, to serve. The truth is, once a person operates within a frame of service the entire world serves and is served, just as the whole being serves and is served.

I understand that rationally its useless to send money through our federal and corporate systems because their goal, ultimately, is not aid, but profit and politics. However, those who are moving towards compassion and an open heart have an opportunity to flex that muscle. I am just saying that giving, even in this context, is not spiritually invaluable.

See what your contributions have done... YOU are paying these people to violate basic rights.

New Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes

By ALEX BERENSON and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: September 8, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Waters were receding across this flood-beaten
city today as police officers began confiscating weapons, including
legally registered firearms, from civilians in preparation for a mass
forced evacuation of the residents still living here.

Police officers looking for survivors today in the Ninth Ward of New
Orleans.

No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns
or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of
police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.

Robert Tracinski of The Intellectual Activist wrote:An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski

It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]

There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

Robert Tracinski is the editor of TIADaily.com and The Intellectual Activist magazine.

and yet, not everyone left there is a neanderthalic creature born from the primordially amoral welfare state.
Many? yes. All? no. If I was there I wouldn't be able to let one good person die out of a group of 20 stranded on a rooftop just because 19 are low-class citizens.Logical? not really, but in feeling and thought truth is valid.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Hi WS,

I watched a younger brother of mine kill himself over a 10 year period with various mind-numbing substances. He did not lack intelligence, but he made a choice to use it for this particular lesson and journey. 8 years in, and 2 years before his lesson was over, I had to let him go even though it broke my heart. I stopped being an emotional caretaker for him. We were very close and I knew he had made his choice on a soul level. Huge and excruciating lesson for all who loved him.

It didn't escape my mind that I was looking at mostly people of African descent in the chaos of New Orleans, and initially, I felt anger at their degredation, but soon remembered that we all do have choices in this density. The author of the article posted by Lonebear is very perceptive in his analysis. The world saw an underbelly of American society that rarely gets exposure, so no wonder the government controlled media is busy creating distractions to make us look elsewhere for the root cause of such human behaviour.

In the news here, a couple of English guys who were in New Orleans found themselves caught up in the Super-dome and they spoke of how the "foreigners" stuck together in this hostile environment, with the sounds of women being raped for background noise. They captured what they saw on a video-camera and those were the only pictures we have seen here in the UK of what was occurring in that Superdome and elsewhere. There was non of that famous Southern hospitality we usually hear of.

If you saw 20 people asking for help and only one of them was "worthy" of help, how would you ensure that the other 19 didn't get your hard-earned dollars? I agree with you that all is valid in thought and feeling, but the reality of this particular matter is that your "charity" is a succumbing to a particularly insidious form of emotional blackmail. But of course thats a as valid a choice of action as any other, but I would question which polarity is being served.

Love,

Vuyiswa

Love is All/All is Love\r\n\r\nWhat you are looking for is what is looking.\r\n- St. Francis of Assisi